An attempt to reconcile two opposite abstractions is at the heart of LR Chadwick’s most ambitious painting to date, Ordained by Design. The first abstraction is automatic drawing guided by intuition. The second is the contrived and conscious guide, the applied restriction of stylised design.

“The journey of realising Ordained by Design took me through many emotions, while cycling through months pride and doubt throughout its making. Now in the end, I am grateful to have been able to better understand my internal and external processes, as well as the broader application of the new abstract awareness it cultivated.”

The result is a fully realised composition where the tension of the balance between instinct and thought render visible the struggle of the painting’s creation. For Chadwick, “painting has never felt more reflective of my internal state”.

Chadwick sees abstract painting as a way of exploring the ineffable, of creating maps of a territory that cannot otherwise be seen. More than this, painting is a tool for him to reconcile his own internal struggles

“through the therapy of artmaking I have learned to apply internal discovery to my relationship with the outside world. And with every complex design and reconciliation of abstract process, I feel my own internal resistances being reconciled; made whole and ever more beautiful, equalling the extent of my creative struggle. My works are reliquaries of grasped awareness within the larger epistemological journey that is carried out as I analyse my artistic process.”